Modern mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers incorporate ever increasing computing power. Smartphones using dual core microprocessors are becoming more and more common. Some smartphone can even be used as a laptop computer with the addition of a docking station. This ever increasing computing power means more and more applications can be run on a single mobile device. When there are a lot of applications installed on a single mobile device, to search for a particular application could be very time consuming and lead to user inconvenience. Often times, due to the limited display area of a mobile device, the numerous applications would have to be spread out over multiple screens, which makes locating a particular application even more difficult.
Moreover, many people use communication networks such as internet, cellular networks, and cable networks to communicate with one another. The different methods of communication include internet based social network such as Facebook or Google+, location based social network such as Color, micro blog such as Twitter, email, instant messaging, public forum, etc. People can also use communication network to share digital contents such as photos, videos, and electronic books, or form groups to buy goods at a discount, such as Groupon. The existing communication methods are mostly designed to serve one primary purpose. For example, Facebook, Color are mostly designed to provide social network service, Yahoo Mail or Gmail is designed to provide primarily email services, Groupon is a dedicated shopping service. These different dedicated services are managed by different companies, therefore they require users to set up different accounts for each of these different services. Each account requires a separate account name and password. Users of these services will need to manage multiple different accounts and multiple different passwords, which can become really inconvenient. Additionally, users will have to log into all these different accounts separately to use these services, which would limit the capability to interchange information between these services. These different communication functions are also often represented by different applications mingled with many other applications on the user's computing devices, which makes locating all these separate applications a time consuming task.
Lastly, rapid advance in technology brought vastly improved new functions to computing devices including mobile devices. For example new smartphones such as iPhone and Android enabled smartphones make touch screen technology a common feature. Motion sensors embedded in these smartphones such as accelerometer and gyro sensors have enabled gesture control technology on these devices. None of these new functions was common on traditional desktop computers. Modern smartphones also have digital cameras and digital video camcorders integrated into the phones directly, changing the traditional method of taking a photo with a standalone camera, taking a video with a video camcorder, and making a phone call with a standalone phone. These new features and new functionalities of the modern communication devices open the opportunity for new ways of operation to improve user experience.
Therefore, there is a need for an integrated and multifunctional media processing and communication method that provides a unique method of operation, integrates the different communication functions, and better utilizes the advance features on modern communication devices to both simplify and enhance user experience.